


From That Good Night

by nimblermortal



Category: Norse Religion & Lore
Genre: Death, Death's day off, Gen, Helheim, Vanir as life spirits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-03
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-16 00:32:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2249229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If they won't give her an invitation, Hel will take it; but having to take it won't keep her from enjoying every moment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From That Good Night

The invitation to the ball had cost Hel three resurrections and four séances. Hel was corrupt. Honesty paled after the first millennium spent alone.

After she was assured of her invitation, she spent three years preparing for the ball itself. Talking to newly dead souls was tiring, confusing, an emotional wreck for both of them. Old souls, those used to being dead, were not so easily startled, they did not burn her sense of the dead, and their stories were not so confusing - but neither could they tell her what a subway was or how to ride one, they couldn’t introduce her to modern music or tell her what people were wearing, they couldn’t tell her where to find money or how to spend it. Hel had only one invitation, and she was not going to squander it by being ill-informed.

The newly dead were greedy, too, they always wanted something in return. The girl who cut Hel’s hair did not want to talk about how she died. They were all like that, or else they refused to believe they were dead, or they refused to stop talking about it. Hel had one man, betrayed by a friend shortly after she was crowned, who had not stopped talking about it since. It seemed a long time to hold a grudge, but Hel could not say she would not do the same if she ever had cause to.

This girl, though, had done Hel a lot of favors, the haircut only the last of them, and Hel was willing to promise her a lot. A whole afternoon with someone she had left behind, and only one message to convey: she loved her, even at the end.

“Wouldn’t she know that already?” Hel asked. The girl, a shy former cosmetologist, flushed and fiddled with her bottles.

“She knows, but I need to say it anyway,” she said. And can’t wait a few decades to do so, Hel thought, amused at the impetuousness of youth. “Are you sure about this?”

Hel glanced in the mirror. “Absolutely.”

“It’s just - you’ll scare a few, you know, mortals.”

“One in particular?” Hel asked. She shrugged and made a throwing gesture at the floor; the old illusion came up around her.

Hel hated it. It throned her in unearthly beauty - anyone who saw it knew something was not right, but it had taken Hel centuries to realize that the illusion on her right side too perfectly mirrored the reality on the left. Real faces had asymmetry. She refused to change the illusion; she’d rather people knew there was something wrong, that even the mortals she hid to protect would recognize her as the daughter of lies. It was her father who had taught her that the most terrifying response was a truth where lies where expected.

“All right then,” the girl said. “You’re sure this is what you want?”

“Undercut on the right side,” Hel said firmly, letting the illusion drop and the familiar shape of her shriveled skull and half-rotted bones fell back across the left side of her reflection; it was her mother who had taught her not to apologize for what she was. “Attend, or I’ll dock your pay.”

Flushing, the girl bent over Hel’s head. Hel closed her eyes, relaxed, and breathed.

 

The first time she had won herself a vacation, she had gone to seek her brothers. Naive of her. Jörmungandr was already an animal; all that was left of Fenrir was his pride in having bitten off Tyr’s hand. He had always been proud, dignified, a bold figure and a noble soul; after seeing him so, Hel did not even try to find Vali and Narvi.

Now she visited other realms just to feel their sun and skies - and winds. Wind was the first thing she noticed when she stepped through the gate into Midgard, and she grinned into it, feeling it lift her hair, stretched her arms out into the prickling of the sun, twirled with joy to be half alive on such a day.

Then she tucked her skirts around her and went to find her cosmetologist’s girl.

She listened to everything on the way, birds and conversations and cars and weather reports and planes overhead and footsteps all around and nowhere a trace of the dead. Everyone living, everyone around her a bright flame atop a candle slowly melting. Everyone thinking, feeling, smiling, shivering as some idea of death went past them.

The cosmetologist’s friend, or relative, or whatever, worked in a flower shop. She cried when Hel gave her the news. Hel, waiting, went to each plant and watered those whose flames burned low, laughing at the idea of her tending life. She sold a bouquet of larkspur and baby’s breath and laughed about that too, and then she turned the sign around to CLOSED and took the weeping woman’s arm in her live one.

“Now - show me your city,” she said, and she bought a camera and took pictures of all the new and strange buildings, the libraries and tech centers and grocery stores, until she had filled up its memory with pictures and her head with her companion’s stories.

They went for a walk in the park and talked about - nothing much. The seasons, and flowers, and politics. Hel asked about the death penalty and euthanasia, abortion and what Right to Life was - she laughed again. Hel dropped the woman off at her own apartment.

“She told me where it was,” Hel explained, meaning the cosmetologist. “And hey - do me a favor and don’t treat this as an invitation to join us sooner, all right? I’ve seen a lot of people try to resolve the problems they had before one of them died, and I’ve seen a lot of people break up because one chose to die too soon.”

She could almost smell the wax returning to the woman’s life-candle.

“How does that work?”

“Ah-ah,” said Hel, smiling. “I don’t have to tell you anything. You’d better get upstairs now; I’m going to take my glamor off.”

“I’m not afraid.”

Hel dropped the illusion without pretense, her peat bog skin matte in the street light. “I have places to be, girl. Go quickly and I’ll still have time to draw runes of forgetfulness on your door.”

The woman ran. The living did not have the patience of the dead, to look longer and wonder how the mummified skin joined to the round new flesh. Hel drew the runes anyway; that memory did not belong to the living world, and remembering it was no way to spend a life.

 

The Vanir held their party in a park, lights strung through the trees. Christmas lights, Hel thought, powered by electricity and not magic, accented by ribbons they could buy at a corner shop. They had put more effort into the food; the Vanir always did. Food and dancing. They threw the best parties, these spirits of fertility and nature and life. They did not often invite a goddess of death to join them. Most of them did not expect to see her here, in a tight black dress that showed far too much skin on both sides. Hel gave them a smile and sashayed into the circles where the light glowed brighter even though a second look showed there was no source for it. She grabbed a Vanir lord by the arm and pulled him onto the dance floor.

He was wooden in her hands, mechanically proceeding through the steps. Hel smiled, and twirled, and dug her right elbow into his side.

“Look alive, or I’ll demand another dance to satisfy your debt,” she said, and he picked up his feet reluctantly and refused to meet her eyes, or to look at the side of her body that drank in the Vanir light.

She could see, in the way that was not seeing, his life-light burning bright and strong. He had promised her this dance for the return of his wife. The wife, Hel had seen when she left Hel’s land, had only gained a decade or two from the exchange. She wondered if the husband could see her sickliness yet.

When the dance was over, she curtsied to him and offered him a smile. “Remember you’ll only ever do one deal with me,” she said, and saw-felt-smelled centuries fall off his life. A balance for the decades she had given the other woman earlier.

There were two others who had promised Hel dances, and Hel was not shy about asking for them. She would not get them otherwise, and she knew better than to sit aside at a party and hope someone else would take her in hand; she had done that too often as a child, and the only hand that had taken either of hers was chained under the ground now. She spaced those dances out between bites of Vanir food and tastes of Vanir wine, and during the second dance, she asked if any relatives had been brewed in mead recently, and laughed when her partner scowled and refused to answer.

She had chosen the highest Vanir lords with loved ones they would bargain for. That won her two more dances with lesser lords who thought they might win favor or esteem for their bravery. She spun those dances out like dew-daubed spider webs, and promised to remember the dancers, though her promises made them uncomfortable and none of them would meet her eyes.

She left before they thought to recognize her, and walked alone into the dark to find a shadow-path back to the gates of Hel. They were never far away. She had made the dancing last past midnight this time, but she would never make it until dawn.

She stopped before she drew the shadows around her back to home, to where the dead would clamor for news from the world of the living and she would laugh and tell them, and smile to describe the feeling of night air on her skin, and nod to see the new souls at the farthest edges of her hall, still frightened of the skin that made her whole. She would rather lose that skin they loved, the watery flesh that glowed like that hated moon with its reflected sunlight, than even one square millimeter of her self.

Hel glowered at the moon, its screaming tortured man-face and its living rituals, and gestured rudely at the time it kept. In her lands there was no moon, no life, no light; and if it were not for skin that reflected moonbeams, she might never long for life outside that night.


End file.
